Raythe looked at home, wandering through the tree city of Arbour beside Jason. She was an elf with dark brown skin and light brown hair, flecked with green. The city was empty of people, the hard-packed dirt roads lined with fallen leaves. Only diffused sunlight made it through the canopy, creating a shady sanctuary. Hanging from the branches were many gourd-like pods, large enough to contain a mid-size sedan.“Is it unusual?” Jason asked, following her gaze as she looked at the pods.“See enough of the cosmos,” Raythe told him, “and you will find that everything and nothing is an oddity. Ordinary astral kings cannot use the planets in their astral realms to birth messengers, but you are not the first original to do so. Or to birth more than messengers. There are others like your lehenik to be found amongst the countless worlds.”“Forgive me if the question is rude, but may I ask how old you are? And how long you have been a prime avatar?”“I do not mind the question, but it is not one I can answer in any way you would understand. My relationship with time is not a linear one.”“Does that mean you can see the future?”“It means that I don’t believe in the future. Not the way you do. For you, the future is fixed. Whatever you encounter it as, when it becomes your present, is what it was always going to be. I see time as a series of interconnected points, the alteration of which ripples to the surrounding points and beyond, altering the whole. To those occupying those points, this process feels like a linear passage through time.”“And your job is what? To stop the ripples from tangling everything up?”“The process is a natural one. The only rule is that any given node in the pattern can only be directly changed by those within it.”“Meaning… no time travel?”“Or any other manipulation of time.”“Well, except the one way to travel through time, obviously.”She looked at him in confusion. (...)